


Deceit's Purpose

by callboxkat



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 04:55:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18542692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callboxkat/pseuds/callboxkat
Summary: After the events of Selfishness vs Selflessness, Deceit tries to figure out how to get through to the other sides and show them that he’s right. But maybe it’s too late.





	Deceit's Purpose

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what this is. It kind of wrote itself.

Deceit paced back and forth in his room, angrily flinging his hat and gloves at the bed and fisting his hands in his hair.

Why were the other sides so ridiculously stubborn? So completely unwilling to listen to him?

Sure, he was Deceit. Sure, he lied. A lot. Maybe. But that didn’t make him _bad_.

Deceit’s main function was, well, deceit. But that wasn’t always _wrong_ , and it didn’t always simply entail him trying to get Thomas to lie with reckless abandon. He had more class than that. More finesse. More sense.

Deceit didn’t just try to make Thomas lie: he also worked to get Thomas to recognize his lies, to be aware of them—especially when he was _lying to himself_. Especially when he was hurting himself by pretending to be something or someone that he wasn’t. Deceit was trying to look out for Thomas! To protect him! The others had even admitted as much the first time that Deceit had revealed himself to their host. So why did the so-called “light sides” still treat him like some horrible, irredeemable piece of garbage?

Now, not only was Thomas not going to the callback, but he was going to the _wedding_ instead. An event he was most certainly not looking forward to. Thomas’s role in it was limited to simply watching the ceremony and saying a brief “hello” to the newlyweds to prove he was there. All it was going to do was make Thomas miserable and satisfy Patton’s need for Thomas to be some kind of morally pure, selfless angel.

But Thomas wasn’t an angel. He was a human. As a human, shouldn’t he get to be selfish sometimes? Especially when it came to once-in-a-lifetime opportunities like this?

Recently, Deceit had been trying to change things, to make them all more aware that Thomas needed to do things for himself sometimes. But it was beginning to feel pointless. Maybe they would never listen, certainly not to a liar like him. Their perceptions were too clouded by what Deceit was.

All he’d wanted to do with the court room scenario was teach the others a lesson and try to convince them to let Thomas do what was best for _him_ for once. Truthfulness was not always the only good option. Selfishness was not inherently inferior to selflessness. Being deceitful did not inherently mean being a bad person.

Deceit wanted to help Thomas; and since he knew the others were hell-bent against Deceit, especially a certain overgrown child and a certain angry purple raccoon, he’d been trying to do it while disguised as one of the “light sides”.

But acting was hard. Deceit was not the creative side, and Thomas simply was not a good liar—therefore, much of the time, neither was Deceit. Even worse, the others didn’t exactly hang out with him a lot, so it was hard to get an idea of how to properly mimic them. He still did his best, but clearly it wasn’t working.

So, how was Deceit meant to help his host, to do his job? To keep Thomas from becoming someone that others simply used, took for granted, and tossed aside? He wasn’t going to duck out—he wouldn’t do that to Thomas, and based on the others’ behavior so far, they probably wouldn’t miss him until the damage was unfixable.

Deceit continued to pace, wracking his imaginary brains for something, anything, he could do to fix this.

But perhaps the damage was done. Perhaps there was nothing Deceit could do to convince them that he was worth listening to. This seemed particularly true in the case of the callback. The others, even Roman, Thomas’s creative drive, were set on making Thomas go to the wedding. All because Deceit had happened to be the one to most seriously try to get him to go to the callback instead.

And now there would be no callback. No Alfred Hitchcoppolucas. No movie, no fame, no fortune, no more doors opened for Thomas. Just more of the same. Just more of the main four sides forcing Thomas to do what _they_ wanted, what _Morality_ wanted.

Heck, the deciding factor that made Deceit choose to pop up in the first place during the callback vs. wedding debate had been the fact that Patton had just kept talking over Thomas, telling him what he needed to do without even asking Thomas what he actually wanted to do.

…

As time went on and the day of the callback and wedding neared, Deceit continued to try to change the others’ minds. But, of course, it didn’t work. Virgil would just yell, or hiss, or simply roll his eyes and leave. Roman would be clearly conflicted, but ultimately deny him, his mind already made up. Patton would point fingers and lecture him on right and wrong, leaving no room for Deceit’s argument. Logan might have listened to him more, but he was still mad at being mostly left out during the courtroom scenario. That may have been a mistake on Deceit’s part, in hindsight, but it was also yet another thing that he could not change. And any time he tried to speak directly with Thomas, Thomas would either immediately banish him, or Virgil would pop up and make him do it.

So, when April 13th finally came, Thomas went to the wedding. He missed the callback. And just as Deceit had expected, as Thomas himself had expected, Thomas had a terrible time. They all did, really.

Virgil spent the whole day anxious about everything that could go wrong. Roman was miserable, both because of the missed callback and because of the loneliness that the wedding dredged up inside him. Logan claimed to be unaffected, but Deceit knew that he felt that the callback would have better served Thomas’s needs and wants in life, even if not going to the callback was akin to Thomas having never gotten the opportunity in the first place. Patton was all but drowning in nostalgia and other feelings. Deceit, meanwhile, spent the day having Thomas lie about the fact that there was somewhere else that he would very much rather have been than at that wedding. And Thomas himself felt all of that.

It was a long day, in short.

Afterwards, Deceit was sitting in the dark, theoretically watching _The Phantom of the Opera_ on the television in the commons of the mind palace. The television was on silent, Deceit’s head resting on one gloved hand as he watched the screen with glazed eyes, his mind elsewhere entirely.

“Ugh,” a voice said, interrupting his thoughts. “What are _you_ doing here?”

“Oh, hello, Virgil. You’re _exactly_ who I was hoping to run into this evening,” Deceit said, rolling his eyes.

“Just get out already. You lost, okay? There’s no point hanging around and bothering everyone anymore! Just GET OUT!”

Deceit turned to look at him. “Oh, of _course_. The entire mind palace belongs to you and your pals, how could I have forgotten?”

“Dude, if this is some pathetic woe-is-me act to try to get us to sympathize with you, it’s not going to work.”

Deceit, deciding he didn’t have the energy for this tonight, just released a heavy sigh and turned his gaze back to the television.

Virgil snapped his fingers, and the screen went dark. Deceit made a point of snapping his own a half-second later, turning it back on. Virgil growled at him. That was unusual, Deceit noted. Usually when Virgil chose to mimic an animal noise, he favored hissing. Roman was more of a growler.

“Why. Are. You. Here,” Virgil demanded, snapping his fingers again. This time, Deceit didn’t turn the show back on. He knew it would just lead to an endless, frivolous fight of turning the television on and off again. The main sides were rather ridiculous, after all.

“Because you’re completely incorrect,” Deceit drawled. “There’s plenty of time to change things. Thomas can still go to the callback, and even barring that, he can get another opportunity like this one! They just grow on trees, after all.”

Virgil frowned at him.

“I was going to watch a movie,” Virgil said.

“Well, clearly, no one else is watching anything right now,” Deceit said.

Virgil, even though he surely knew what Deceit meant by that, shrugged and snapped his fingers. A different movie started playing, _Phantom of the Opera_ gone.

“I wasn’t watching that!”

“I don’t care. Don’t you get it? We don’t want you here. _I_ don’t want you here. Just go! Get out of here!”

“No!”

Virgil threw himself onto the couch and put his legs up on it, crowding Deceit into the corner—as petty of a tactic as all get out.

“Why not? You don’t even do anything good for Thomas. All you do is show up in cartoonishly awful costumes and jeopardize all of his friendships! How is that helping? _All you do is lie._ ”

“That isn’t all I do,” Deceit said, his voice shaking from anger, but slow and deliberate.

“Ah, he admits it.”

“Yes! I mean—No, I don’t! I’m not just deceit!”

“It is literally your _name_. You are Deceit.”

“You aren’t _just_ Anxiety, are you?”

“That’s different.”

“Is it? Is it so hard to believe that I might be useful for things other than deception? You may be Anxiety, but you are also _Virgil_ , correct?” Deceit was practically vibrating with anger now. Why did the others refuse to understand? Why did his primary function have to make getting his point across so much more difficult?

“Deceit—.”

“My name isn’t Deceit! My name is _ETHAN!_ ”

Virgil stopped. He stared for a moment, eyes wide. For a second, Deceit thought that maybe, he’d actually gotten through to him. Maybe, he’d actually found a way to start to prove to Virgil that he wasn’t just a single function, incapable of being anything more, of being anything _good_.

But then Virgil’s gaze hardened.

“That’s just another lie.”


End file.
